After last week’s intergalactic alien hunt, this week we moved to a Danish pond i.e. we played Frog Rush (Lego, 2011).  I see Frog Rush as an example of a replacement game i.e. the winner is the first player to get all their pieces across to the opposite of the board, and occupy the spaces that the other player started in. Examples of replacement games include Chinese Chequers and Halma.

In Frog Rush, each player has five frogs. There is a special die, a roll of which determines that the player can either: move one frog either 1, 2 or 3 spaces in any direction; leapfrog over an adjacent frog to an empty space; move the stork to capture a frog which is on the pond. When all of one player’s frogs have reached their home, or all of one player’s frogs have been captured by the stork, the game ends. Each frog on a home bench scores 3 points, each frog on a home rock scores 2 points, and each frog on a home shore scores 1 point.  The most points wins.

It didn’t take the children long to work out a strategy: a frog on the pond is vulnerable to capture by the stork, so they moved their frogs around the pond along the shore. This took a bit longer but was definitely safer. The children played in pairs, and also as a four. As a four things did get a little congested and the game lasted longer than we expected.

There was just enough time for a quick game of Five Field Kono, a lovely replacement game from Korea. There is no jumping over or capturing, just pure movement in space as each player moves one piece from an intersection to the next empty intersection. Players can move forwards and backwards, and will at some point have to move backwards when the other player blocks their path.

Next week we will play Zone X, a game where one player hides a target and the other player has to find out where the target is in the fewest number of moves.

 

This week was Mancala week at our Board Games Club for Adults. Mancala refers to a genre of games, rather than one specific game. There are hundreds of variations. The board has a series of shallow holes (or pits), and players take turns to move (or sow) their pieces (or seeds), dropping them into each pit in turn in an anti-clockwise direction. The winner is the player with the most seeds at the end of the game. There are only a few rules, but they take a bit of thinking about (especially the capture rule).

According to Mohr (The New Games Treasury, 1997), the “very earliest boards come from northeast Africa. Boards have been found carved into the stone of the pyramid of Cheops and in the temples at Luxor and Karnak, establishing Mancala as one of the oldest games in the world”. Mancala spread throughout Africa (in almost every African nation some version of Mancala is played) and into Asia, the Caribbean and South America. It is known in Europe where (to quote Mohr again) “unfortunately it has remained little more than a curiosity”. Mohr is correct: this is a great game that deserves to be better known.

You can play Mancala online for free. There is no need to log in – play as a single player. Choose your difficulty level and start playing. The one advantage of this online version is that it tells you the number of seeds in each pit, saving you the time of counting them!